The Russian FSB, Russia's version of the CIA, helped fool Olympic drug testing protocols by defeating tamper-resistant packaging containing urine samples. It's not explained how they did this, but one way to defeat tamper-resistant packaging is to create a duplicate of the packaging. Tamper-resistant packaging is designed to be difficult to counterfeit, but a state intelligence agency, given essentially unlimited resources, can probably counterfeit anything.
Tamper-resistant or tamper-evident packaging is designed so that it can't easily be opened without it being obvious that it has been compromised, using plastics that can't be opened without tearing or cutting and tapes with holograms and the like that can't be removed without damage. When designing tamper-resistant packaging, it's best if every package is unique in some way that's difficult to counterfeit and this unique aspect is recorded in some way, such as by photographing. Such techniques are effective against most anyone, but not against a well-funded state agency.
One approach that may work even against a state agency is to incorporate printed currency, a U.S. five-dollar bill for example, that is difficult to duplicate exactly. A state agency could presumably create a perfect counterfeit of U.S. currency, but the bills have tiny red and blue fibers randomly distributed throughout the paper that are essentially impossible recreate in exactly the same configuration. They are easy to distinguish from printed imitations, even with the naked eye. A photograph of a five-dollar bill with sufficient resolution to show the red and blue fibers is effectively unique against attack by any worldly agency. If the bill is incorporated in the packaging in a way that it can't be removed without damaging the bill or the packaging, it seems that such a protocol would be effective.
You still need to photograph the bill together with the packaging and guarantee the integrity of the photograph. Digital photographs can be processed with SHA hashing but then the hash value needs to be protected in some way. Probably the best way to ensure the integrity of the hash values is via a block chain, which associates the existence of the photograph with a precise point in time, relatively speaking. The temporal integrity of a block chain is a whole separate topic, but you can establish absolutely that a certain point in the block chain came after a certain point in time by, for example, incorporating a photograph of a newspaper front page. So if the photograph to be verified is added to the block chain on the day it's taken, and then you incorporate a photograph of the next day's newspaper front page into the block chain, anything that hits the block chain after that is obviously counterfeit. Adding a group of photographs to the block chain all at once adds to the security because of the difficulty of counterfeiting multiple photographs.
It's a lot to go through, but it seems that the audacity of the "evil empire", what's left of it, has evolved to the point that it's necessary to go full out with securing Olympic drug tests.
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Later news stories described in more detail what happened. It turned out that the supposedly "tamper proof" bottles used to store urine samples were not temper proof at all, and the Russian FSB had no difficulty opening them and replacing the contents without detection. From the description of the closing mechanism, I assume that they used a combination of heat and cold to loosen the cap enough for it to be opened.
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